obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

the prodigy kind of hit be my surprise in 1997. i don't know if the kids realize it, but 1997 was the year that techno really broke. there was that huge daft punk record. the chemical brothers. and, the fat of the land.

i was veering in this direction, but i was following more of an underground path, through offshoots of 80s industrial, which i'd been set on by a mild obsession with a couple of nine inch nails remix discs released before 1996, and a beginning exploration of the warp records catalog. research was largely done over the internet, and through conversations with people 5-10 years older than i was. i was aware of the raver kids around me, but i didn't really understand what they were. my intuition was that a rave was really just another kind of high school dance, and my punk instincts put me squarely against it as a consequence of it. looking back, i regret keeping an arm's distance from it - in hindsight, i understand that this was a very wrong perspective and that the truth is that if i was looking for punks in the mid to late 90s then the place i'd be most likely to find them at was actually a rave. i never really came face-to-face with the prodigy until they were roaring at me over muchmusic.

this isn't a record i've come back to much over the years. the fact that i was exploring much more abstract types of electronic music should say a little bit about where my head was always really at in relation to the genre, and what i'm really looking for; even jilted doesn't really hold up well, despite it's importance. but, the fact that something comparable to what i was searching out over usenet was coming at me from mainstream media was exciting to me for a little while, and it coerced me into biting into this disc pretty hard, for a little while. you can hear little bits of it all over the discography.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, evil is a human construction, subtle nods elsewhere)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i came at the aphex twin from a different angle. i do wonder if he's ever bothered to listen to a nine inch nails record, all these years later. but, reznor was a hell of a gateway to a fifteen year old in the mid 90s, and the aphex twin wasn't the first thing i delved into - it actually came at me via a roundabout way, through the skinny puppy side project called download, which is what really branched me out into the warp sound. i was initially more attracted to the more chaotic reaches of industrial music - i was a punk. and, as a "rock fan", i largely self-segregated myself from music in the electronic sphere. so, it took several years of easing into it before i could handle listening to "techno music". these mental shackles did of course eventually lift themselves, and i am certainly better off for it.

anybody coming from a multidisciplinary background and claiming rdj as an influence is going to be expected to point mostly to the breakbeats, and there's a few in there, but he was actually just as much of a compositional influence for me, as i moved on. i think we share a big influence from coil in that respect - although he's got about ten years on me. but, the orchestrated soft synths coming from rdj are what really defines him differently, and something i've made various attempts to emulate.

(relevant tracks: on sexual confusion in adolescence, clarity, the time machine, untitled; pretty much everything from 1998 on)

i've pointed out here a few times that my soundcards have been behaving poorly, and that i've isolated it, only to realize i hadn't.

i'm not sure what happened near the end of june, but it seems to have undone things in a way that i wasn't fully aware of. i'm running a very stripped down version of xp on my recording pc that cuts a large amount of the operating system out. in the process of trying to fix the problem, i seem to have put in place problems related to the windows xp sound mixer, which is known to be not very good for audio processing due to the way that it interferes with audio streaming. i think my initial script had broken the kmixer, and i had reinstalled it in an attempt to fix the problem, which created a whole other slew of problems.

i think i've fixed it in a two step process:

1) lock all sample rate conversion in the drivers.
2) delete the streaming drivers (mskssrv, mspclock, mspqm), which seem to be involved in conversion.

my initial script had deleted the streaming drivers, but not locked the sample rate. the result was that if i deleted the streaming drivers, i'd end up with fading because something was moving back and forth in the drivers. but, if i left the drivers in place, i'd get bad results from the windows conversion process.

locking the audio drivers without deleting the streaming drivers resulted in the files playing at the wrong speed, which seems to have been a consequence of an incomplete conversion process. but deleting the streaming drivers with the audio drivers locked in place seems to have resolved the issue.

i'm still testing, but i think i've got it figured out.

in the meantime, the alter-reality has caught up with me, and is now entering the synth-pop phase of my musical career (which was all of 1998 and early 1999). the catalyst was a four-track recorded that i got for christmas at the end of 1997. it's january 8th in the alter-reality; my first completed, uploaded track is dated to january 9th and will be featured tonight at midnight.

the featured tracks will now begin to change more frequently, which means i'll be posting more influences. there will not be any more lengthy pauses in this process for several years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0&t=15m50s

shifting to period 1.2 in the alter-reality

i ended up losing yesterday after all in a haze of election ramblings. it's another six weeks still. but i'm going to do some listening this evening, and think i'll quick lose myself back in it as soon as i'm sure it's actually fixed.

the alter-reality updates tonight at midnight, which is the long awaited movement directly into the synth pop phase. the updates will be more frequent moving forwards, as the lull over late 97 has come to an end.

i made a decision last year to upload pieces from this period in larger segments, so the updates are going to be a little strange, with tracks moving in and out until the period closes a little over a year from now. this video has the first six songs from the first demo, but i'm really drawing attention to fourth track, which starts at 15:50.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0

i've been kind of moping around the last few days, wanting to keep my distance and my mind elsewhere, but i came back to it last thing tonight and i think i've finally got it.

locking the sample rate ended up consistently playing the files too quickly through wdm - a clock issue. again - sort of, maybe. so, i broke it again. and, this time, it seems to have come out ideally.

i've noticed that the streaming device is not reappearing. that suggests to me that it's part of the sample rate conversion. this may be the combination i had previous stumbled upon which broke the kmixer in the right way: it both locks the rate on the device and uninstalls the conversion driver, leading to a straight stream. or so it seems...

i have a little more testing to do, but it's a big shot of hope. best it's sounded in some time. i will get right to this in the morning, as i've got my focus and drive back.

well, this is hilarious - setting it to "headphones" seems to have made a rather dramatic difference.

i....think...i..

i can't remember.

that's some hope. i'll try it again when i wake up. i think it's another step to it, anyways.

not ants, but water

hi.

i've been checking for ants periodically, and it seems to be ok for right now. but i've noticed that some of the drywall in that enclave is rotting. it's over in the corner, pretty much directly underneath where the water from the air conditioner is constantly falling off the porch. i haven't touched it, but it's pretty obvious from looking at it that if i were to touch it, it would cave right in.

now, i don't know for sure that the reason the drywall is rotting through is water from the air conditioner. it's been humid, then cold, then humid, then cold, then humid. but, it *is* directly under where the water is coming down.

and, i don't know how substantial a problem it is - i just don't know.

but, i thought i should let you know that it appears to be rotting and that a good guess is that the water is dripping into there.

j

yeah, no, it's gotta be that fucking sample conversion - even on seven. because now that i've played it through bandcamp, it sounds better through youtube and locally through foobar. fuck. it's set up right. there has to be a way to stop it.

i'm going to see what happens if i just completely disable the entire wdm architecture and force it to play through directsound. will that even work?

i am so remarkably discouraged right now. literally nothing sounds right, and i don't have the slightest understanding as to why.

i have five years, now.

i'm considering putting it down for a few weeks and focusing on some reading, instead. the closest i can get to a decent sound is through bandcamp, which is a streaming mp3 at 128kbps. everything else through every other combination is completely wrong.

i dunno. like, if somebody wants me to give up on this, they might be disappointed at what i do instead. it's not going to be more productive. it's going to be writing essays of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and posting them to a website nobody reads.

yeah. i think i got it.

the sound architecture in xp is much maligned. it's one of those examples of microsoft taking too much control over something that ought to have minimal operating system interference. they never *really* fixed this, but it changed a lot in vista.

i've known this the whole time but it was never really a problem before, so why would it be a problem now? well, i may have changed a few settings at some time in the past and forgotten...

the kmixer seeks to resample everything, in ways that often make little sense. it seems like the people that designed it didn't really know a lot about audio, they just figured that upsampling everything to the highest formats possible would be a best practice strategy across the board. that's not true, for reasons i won't get into.

both the m-audio and the alesis come with lock settings that prevent any modification of the sample rate from outside sources. locking the devices to 44.1 had a big effect on the wdm driver outs for both devices, presumably because it's stopping any sample rate conversion. an a/b with the asio outs through cubase actually suggest that this minor fix creates an inaudible difference through wdm and a larger difference through directsound. before i locked them, it was directsound that clearly sounded better. so, this is a big difference.

i want to draw attention to this, though. because i had both outs to 44.1. why would windows upsample a stream when the source and hardware are set to the same value? that is entirely absurd. and, who would think you need to lock the rate in place to prevent the operating system from interfering? it's utter madness, truly.

but, i think this is at least a partial fix. i'll need to do more testing over night to determine if it's fully fixed or only half fixed. but, the difference is quite positive and quite obvious, so i think this is the solution to the bulk of the problem.

the problem was less fixing the problem once i figured out what it was and more trying to figure out what it was.

and, the reason the soundblaster stayed stable was because 44.1 was the max - which was also the reason that switching from the soundblaster to the m-audio fixed the m-audio [it went back to 44.1, until it was re-opened].

what i'm leaning towards with the sound issue is that the windows kmixer is resampling and the directsound isn't; that is, that by playing through directsound, i'm avoiding resampling. so, i'm going to play with some things to see if i can try and lock it in at 44.1.

the m-audio and alesis can both stream at over 200K. but i don't want windows doing conversions on the fly, dithering, etc.

when i brought in the student loan forms, the psychiatrist and nurse practitioner got into an argument as to who ought to fill them out.

i don't blame them. the language is over the top. i would have a hard time declaring myself "severely permanently disabled", as well. the truth is that i'm really just an anarchist.

i left them with the forms. i have no idea if they'll fill them out. and, to be frank, i would not begrudge them for refusing to.

i may have to get used to living on $60/month less. if i'm not smoking, that's entirely feasible.

i called the student loan people today and they extended the waiver, meaning i'm good for another two months, anyways.

the psychiatrist also claims that he can't fill out hormone prescriptions - i don't think that's actually true. the nurse practitioner will do it, but only on the instruction of an endocrinologist. and, i don't think i'm likely to get through to this guy in london again. he's going to look into it. i don't want to go to toronto, but if i have to...

i was hoping this would just be dealt with yesterday, i'll be back on the 15th and have to make decisions about things as they come up.

as i've posted here before, the feminizing hormones are kind of secondary to me at this point. the more important thing is that i'm able to keep taking the testosterone suppressors. i'm more into rejecting sexual identity altogether. it's not that the identification has changed, i will continue to identify as mentally female whether i'm on the hormones or not, it's more that i'm at a point in my life where i've accepted that my gender identity is almost entirely irrelevant, because i'm going to spend the rest of my life by myself in my bedroom. it's hard to care about how you present yourself when you're not presenting yourself anywhere. but, the testosterone reduction is very intellectually liberating and of extreme importance. i never, ever think about sex anymore. i'd like to maintain that. i'm not a sexual creature. returning testosterone levels are just likely to be an annoyance and a distraction.

worst case scenario, i could probably get the testosterone suppressors prescribed by carrying out some kind of deviant sex act, like hanging out downtown naked for as long as it takes to get arrested. it would of course be a non-aggressive act. just enough to get the prescription.

it turns out that directsound is just a layer on wdm since 2000. weird. can't explain this, but it's clear...

so, the reason it sounded correctly through smplayer and poorly through foobar is that i was accessing devices in smplayer through the directsound interface and devices in foobar through the wdm interface. there is a workaround to this: i can set the device to default and then set foobar to the primary sound driver. this gets around the wdm kmixer and doesn't merely sound clean but sounds far superior..

kmixer is known to be crappy in certain circumstances, but what i'm experiencing over and over is far worse than anything i was experiencing previously.

i need to play with some things still, but it's now clear - seriously this time - that it's a windows/wdm thing. i just don't know if i can fix this, or if i should be working around it.

see, now it seems like it's fading through foobar and not fading through smplayer.

i'm falling asleep...

i'll have time when i wake up, before the appointment.

but, i ended up breaking it to the point where i had to do a last known good, which brought me back to a point where i'd might as well reinstall. one more time. shit to do tomorrow. back at it soon.

so, i was getting funky results out of the other players after all - it's not just a foobar issue.

the soundblaster actually stayed consistent out of the box for quite a while, until i broke the sound. it came back a little after a few things, but it's really the cleanest sound. and, i think i got the m-audio card stable through nothing more complicated than uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, which is ridiculous - because i just installed them. but, that was after a number of over things...

i think i want to avoid breaking the system, because the soundblaster never really came back.

i've been noticing since day one that the m-audio card seems to perform better when a suite of system devices are running: the audio echo canceller and the kernel splitter, especially. the issue seems to have something to do with this. but it's completely inconsistent. sometimes, it drops out as soon as those devices do. sometimes, it sounds fine without them even turning on.

the only way to consistently turn these devices on is through cubase.

so, i'm coming to what is an endpoint. if everything is working except that card? i'm better off ignoring the card. i'll just disable it. and, so, i'll be back to work soon.

my goal today is to figure this out, finally, so i can get back to work on wednesday.

no, it's the same weird shit. grargh. well, at least it's clear, now.

if i open foobar on the laptop while there is no open stream in youtube, i get exactly the same blunted sound i'm getting on the recording pc. but, if i open it while there is an open stream (or i open a stream while it's open), it snaps back to the right sound.

so, it's like it can't load the drivers right, but if something else loads the drivers for it then it knows what to do.

keep in mind that this is subtle. i previously just thought it was inherent hardware differences.

deleting replaygain seems to have helped.